1/29/25: Trump Funding Freeze Blocked By Judge, Stephen Miller Spars With Tapper, Charlamagne Confronts Vivek On DOGE Exile, US Romania Coup, Trump Envoy In Gaza

Summary

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar: January 29, 2025

Hosts: Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti
Release Date: January 29, 2025
Description: Breaking Points is a fearless anti-establishment multi-week YouTube and Podcast that holds the powerful to account, hosted by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti.

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1. Federal Funding Freeze Blocked by Judge

Overview: The episode opens with a deep dive into the Trump administration's attempt to freeze federal grants and loans. A federal judge has temporarily blocked this move until February 3, raising significant concerns about the administration's handling of federal funds.

Key Points:

• Judge's Ruling: The judge paused the implementation of Trump's order to freeze federal grants and loans, causing confusion among various organizations relying on this funding.

• Impact on Medicaid: Despite the administration's claims that individual assistance programs like Medicaid would remain unaffected, numerous reports indicate that Medicaid portals have been interrupted, affecting over 70 million people.

• Interview with Jeff Stein (00:30-39:19): Jeff Stein from the Washington Post provides detailed insights into the chaos surrounding the funding freeze. He explains that the Trump administration's order was vague, leading to widespread misinterpretation and unintended consequences. Stein emphasizes the lack of clear communication from the Trump team and highlights the potential legal challenges ahead.

Notable Quotes:

• Krystal Ball (03:04): "We need your help to build the future of independent news media."
• Jeff Stein (11:54): "The White House not having an answer to that question reflected I think kind of an amazing lack of planning."

2. Immigration Policy: Stephen Miller vs. Jake Tapper

Overview: The discussion shifts to the intense exchange between Stephen Miller, the Trump administration's immigration advisor, and CNN's Jake Tapper. Miller defended the administration's harsh immigration policies, asserting that all individuals illegally in the country should be considered criminals.

Key Points:

• Defining Criminals: Krystal Ball and Saagar debate the semantics of labeling immigration violations as criminal offenses. They point out that while crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor, overstaying a visa is a civil infraction, complicating the administration's blanket statements.

• ICE Quotas: The administration has set aggressive quotas for deportations, aiming for 1,200-1,500 daily arrests. Critics argue that such numbers make it nearly impossible to target only violent criminals, leading to the deportation of non-violent individuals.

• Public Perception: Polls indicate that a significant portion of Americans supports mass deportations, but the practicality and ethical implications of such actions remain contentious.

Notable Quotes:

• Stephen Miller (41:54): "We are going to unapologetically enforce our immigration laws."
• Saagar Enjeti (14:15): "This entire four years will probably be like the last 15 minutes of a horror movie."

3. Media Trust and Corporate Influence

Overview: Krystal and Saagar delve into the erosion of trust in mainstream media, highlighting instances where corporate interests have influenced reporting. The departure of CNN anchor Jim Acosta is examined as a case study of corporate media's shifting allegiances.

Key Points:

• Jim Acosta's Exit: Acosta left CNN, citing a desire to remain independent. Krystal and Saagar discuss how corporate media outlets like CNN and CBS have increasingly aligned with corporate interests, leading to biased reporting and marginalization of dissenting voices.

• Corporate vs. Independent Media: The hosts argue that mainstream media's reliance on corporate funding has compromised their ability to hold power to account, contrasting this with the rise of independent media platforms that strive for unbiased reporting.

Notable Quotes:

• Jim Acosta (75:00): "I will not give in to the lies. I will not give in to the fear."
• Krystal Ball (78:35): "Democrats hitched their wagon to a corporate structure rather than a people-powered structure."

4. Romanian Election Controversy

Overview: A significant portion of the episode is devoted to the annulment of Romania's presidential election, initially attributed to Russian interference but later revealed to be orchestrated by local establishment parties.

Key Points:

• Election Annulment: The Romanian Supreme Defense Council invalidated the November 24 election, citing alleged foreign interference. Initial reports blamed Kremlin-backed social media campaigns.

• Underlying Motives: Investigations revealed that the annulment was driven by internal political maneuvering from establishment parties aiming to suppress outsider candidates.

• US Involvement: The hosts critique the US-funded media outlet, Context, for prematurely attributing the annulment to Russian influence without concrete evidence, highlighting issues of bias and misinformation.

Notable Quotes:

• Krystal Ball (104:05): "A NATO country when you don't have any evidence of voter fraud or anything. Like no allegations..."
• Saagar Enjeti (105:57): "It was actually Romanians. But it's like saying that we have to cancel out, like..."

5. Steve Witkoff's Visit to Gaza

Overview: The episode covers Steve Witkoff's high-profile visit to Gaza alongside Israeli Minister Ron Dermer. This marks the first visit by a US government official to Gaza in 15 years.

Key Points:

• Purpose of Visit: Witkoff aims to engage in peace talks and assess the situation on the ground, potentially signaling a shift in US foreign policy towards the Middle East.

• Israeli Response: The visit has caused unrest among Israeli political circles, with accusations that Witkoff is aligned with controversial figures or foreign interests like Qatar.

• Insights from Murtaza Hussain (108:35-123:22): Hussain provides on-the-ground observations from Syria and Gaza, discussing the severe devastation in Syria and the complex dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian relations. He highlights the challenges of rebuilding and the potential for further instability if the US withdraws support.

Notable Quotes:

• Steve Witkoff (108:37): "I'm pursuing my next steps at the state level."
• Murtaza Hussain (112:08): "Syria was a very nice country. Today if you go to Syria, it's like the apocalypse happens there beyond."

6. Michigan Senate Race and Political Shifts

Overview: Gary Peters' unexpected retirement from the Michigan Senate opens the field for potential candidates, including Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Vivek Ramaswamy, causing a ripple effect in the political landscape.

Key Points:

• Potential Candidates: Buttigieg is exploring a run for the Senate seat, while Ramaswamy faces challenges in the Republican primary due to past controversies and criticism.

• Election Dynamics: The hosts discuss the intricacies of the race, emphasizing the strategic moves by both parties to secure the seat amidst shifting demographics and political sentiments in Michigan.

Notable Quotes:

• Krystal Ball (60:56): "No, but it did take everybody by surprise that he announced. Peters announced his retirement yesterday."
• Saagar Enjeti (61:26): "I wouldn't expect anything different."

7. Conclusion and Future Outlook

Overview: Krystal and Saagar wrap up the episode by reflecting on the broader implications of current events on American politics and media. They emphasize the need for independent media and the challenges posed by corporate influence.

Key Points:

• Media Evolution: The hosts advocate for supporting independent media platforms like BreakingPoint.com to ensure unbiased reporting.

• Political Instability: They highlight ongoing global and domestic challenges, including foreign interference, immigration policy debates, and shifting political alliances, forecasting continued turmoil in the political arena.

Notable Quotes:

• Krystal Ball (94:27): "There's nothing more frustrating than knowing that you're eating well. But it's not working."
• Saagar Enjeti (124:35): "We fitted in all of the debates about the constitutionality of executive officials. We solved the problem."

Conclusion

In this episode of Breaking Points, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti provide a comprehensive analysis of the Trump administration's recent actions to freeze federal funding, the complexities of immigration policy, the erosion of trust in mainstream media, and significant political events both domestically and internationally. Through insightful interviews and critical discussions, the hosts underscore the importance of independent journalism and remain vigilant against the influence of corporate and foreign powers in shaping political narratives.

For more in-depth discussions and updates, visit BreakingPoints.com.

Transcript

[Krystal Ball]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Krystal Ball]

We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Hope to see [e-mail] all right. Good morning and welcome to Counterpoints. I was just telling Emily that my new favorite medium is TikTok.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, I just learned Ryan is like a TikTok celebrity.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Loving it. Loving TikTok.

[Krystal Ball]

Just the last couple of weeks.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Thanks, everybody. It's fun over there. I'm going to stick around now that Trump salvaged that. But if he sells it to Microsoft or Oracle or our government.

[Krystal Ball]

Have you seen. That's part of the. I mean, there's a big distinction. Yeah, but it's on the table.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Microsoft has never made a consumer product worth using. Oracle is basically a project of the CIA and TikTok's a project of the CCP. So I guess we don't have any.

[Krystal Ball]

Great choices, but drowning in Alphabet soup. Yeah, well, you didn't like the Zune. Wasn't that a Microsoft product?

[Sagar Enjeti]

I forget all of their products. Somebody at Microsoft the other day was like, remember how bad the Microsoft phone was? I was like, I literally don't even remember the Microsoft phone.

[Krystal Ball]

I also don't remember a Microsoft phone.

[Sagar Enjeti]

No, that's how bad it was. Okay. Awful.

[Krystal Ball]

Well, we do have a lot of news today, actually just like an almost impossible amount of news. Like every time you think a Trump era news cycle is crazy, you are not at the peak. You still have not peaked. Even though it feels like speaking of drowning, that you're just drowning in news by the hour.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I heard your man Steve Bannon call it Days of thunder.

[Krystal Ball]

Is that what he's saying?

[Sagar Enjeti]

He was at an event last night with Breitbart. The whole butterwurst, like the, you know, the, like it's this like right wing bar that's like become the, like.

[Krystal Ball]

It's great.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's like where Jefferson and Franklin and the French revolutionaries. It's like the French Cafe version from the revolution. Yeah, yeah. So they're pumped.

[Krystal Ball]

Oh, were you there?

[Sagar Enjeti]

No, I didn't go.

[Krystal Ball]

Oh, okay.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I'm not doing anything. This is about the only thing I leave the house for now with my wife.

[Krystal Ball]

That's true, that's true. But so let's. We'll be talking about.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I did get invited, though. That's how weird this world is.

[Krystal Ball]

See, that's. I figured that you were on the list. He's a regular war room listener. You gotta tune in to hear what's going on. So the shutdown, obviously the federal aid shutdown has been significant throughout the last 24, 48 hours, but there are a ton of updates pertaining to what is, what is, not, what was and what was not covered. That we are going to start with. We're excited to have Jeff Stein here who was chasing down a lot of leads yesterday as a reporter. The Trump administration is saying that Jeff and other reporters are part of a big Quote, unquote hoax. And that's how all of this got started.

[Sagar Enjeti]

This is gonna be their big thing. Anytime they screw up.

[Jeff Stein]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

They'll be like, see, hoax, another hoax, other hoax from the mainstream media.

[Krystal Ball]

I'm gonna do that, too.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And meanwhile, people will be like, I can't get into my Medicaid. Why is the mainstream media keeping the Medicaid portal from working?

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, Jake, we'll ask Jeff. Why is it flipping the switch? Yeah, yeah. So we'll have Jeff here to run down exactly what happened yesterday, what's happening right now. We'll bring you updates on that. We have a great immigration just going through, Stephen Miller's wild interview with Jake Tapper on CNN yesterday evening. But also the raids that happened yesterday. Who's actually being swept up in these raids? Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was suited up.

[Sagar Enjeti]

She put on some gear.

[Krystal Ball]

Suited up. They had the photog. They were ready to go. So we'll be doing a block on that. It looks like Pete Buttigieg might finally be in a good position to win elected office on again.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Remember, this is the powerhouse mayor of whatever town that is.

[Krystal Ball]

I was just gonna say on the federal level, because there is now a Senate.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The town where Notre Dame is a.

[Krystal Ball]

Senate seat open in, obviously Pete Buttigieg's famous home state of Michigan, which actually a lot of people don't realize. He moved to Michigan a couple of years ago, likely with something like this point.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, people were always saying that he's cursed because he's got such high ambitions, yet he's from Indiana, where no Democrat is going to be elected to the Senate or the governor's mansion in a very long time. And Buttigieg was like, wait, do I live in Indiana? No, I do not live in Indiana. In fact, I am a longtime Michigander.

[Krystal Ball]

Yes, of course. He just bleeds Michigan. But we'll be talking about that. It's a pretty interesting Senate race that's shaping up. So.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And Vivek, he's bleeds Ohio.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, Vivek was on Charlemagne and Breakfast Club, and we have a great clip, so stay tuned.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And he was strongly suggesting he's running for something. Yep.

[Krystal Ball]

American hero Jim Acosta signed off of CNN yesterday after they tried to bump him to a later slot. We have a truly hilarious video of Jim Acosta's sign off from cnn. Just great stuff. Excited for that one.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Did you see his Substack Live?

[Krystal Ball]

Oh, he launched a substack.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And. And he said in his first Substack Live, he said, I'm going independent for now. Which is such a delightful way to use the phrase independent. I love that. To qualify it with for now. For now, just buy me out. Cause it's like, well, wait a minute. It's one thing to say I'm going independent. Okay. Because that suggests you weren't independent before, even if you did work for somebody.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Then to qualify it with for now.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah. Right. Because independent has such a. It has such a positive connotation to be like.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But not to people like him. To him. To him and his circle, it reads as a failure.

[Krystal Ball]

Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And for him it's four. Now maybe he gets scooped up by the contrarian, which is the new explosive centrist. The Jen Rubin joint Norm Eisen substack.

[Krystal Ball]

Maybe he will. He would love that. We should also in that block make sure to mention the hilarious Crystalizza thread. We're both obviously very close observers of Chris Lizza's Twitter feed where he just without any self awareness, goes through things that he got significantly wrong over the last decade. It's incredible. So we'll hopefully bring a little bit of that to the table as well. Romania, Ryan's publication drop site had an absolutely fantastic rundown of US intervention in Romanian elections that just happened. Huge story that just really hasn't been covered.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Really crazy story.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah. So we're going to do that. And then your colleague Murtaza. Murtaza Hussain is here.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. So Murtaza is going to talk about Steve Witkoff going to Gaza with Ron Dermer. So this is Trump's Mideast envoy. Said a week or two ago that he wanted to go visit Gaza, which shook up Israeli politics. Like, what do you mean you're gonna go visit Gaza? You're gonna talk to Hamas? Like, that's not how that works. He's a dealmaker. He's like, how am I gonna make a deal if I don't like, understand both sides here? Ron Dermer, who is Netanyahu's basically longtime top lieutenant, accompanied him to the Nazarene quarter. Murtaza just returned from a report Syria. He'll also update us about what's going on there. What he has told me about what he saw on the ground there is utterly fascinating. He says the fighting is, by the way, not complete, in fact. And while Assad has left because Assad's government was so heavily propped up by basically drug trafficking, they make coptagon this like disgusting, like low grade speed that they sell mostly to Russia because they were making so much money from Captagon. Those commanders are like we're not quitting. I don't care if you flew to Russia. We control this little bit of land. We got a factory that's making captagon. We're making money hand over fist. We have weapons. What are you going to do about it? So it's a very incendiary situation.

[Krystal Ball]

Well, that'll be a fascinating conversation with Maz. So let's dive into the news today with the federal aid grants. The federal aid, the loans, the grants, the freeze shutdown on those. Let's go to Jeff Stein for some updates.

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[Krystal Ball]

A judge has ordered a freeze on the OR has ordered a pause on the Trump funding freeze. We can put this first hair sheet up on the screen from CNBC. A federal judge paused, actually until February 3rd, the implementation of a Trump administration order that would have frozen the issuance of federal grants and loans. We are joined by Jeff Stein of the Washington Post, who just over the last couple of days has been working really hard on this story. Busy man, busy man. Running down all kinds of news and reporting. So Jeff, thank you for being here.

[Jeff Stein]

My pleasure. Great to be on with Crystal And.

[Krystal Ball]

Sagar, that's bait and switch.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, bait and switch. That's the only way we can get people on this program.

[Krystal Ball]

We always have Sagar.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And then we show up and they're like, holy cow, what's going on? I guess I'm here. Might as well do the hit.

[Krystal Ball]

Well, Jeff, let's just start with this news about the pause. Can you just tell us a little bit about what this means? I think that's a good place to start because it's really confusing. Like, at any given point yesterday, what was actually happening was confusing because people were interpreting what the White House sent, and the White House was saying that they should be interpreting it differently. But actually, in practice, people's interpretations kind of become policy. So as of right now that there's a freeze, let's say you are. Are the veterans charity that you talk to in California mostly funded by federal grants. What does this mean for you?

[Jeff Stein]

What it should mean, at least, is that there is no stoppage of funding. And so whatever was expected to come in the next few months would. And that there would be no interruption. However, in the last 12 hours or so, I've been receiving numerous texts, signal messages, calls, emails from people who say that their funding is being interrupted. And so it's 8:30 or so this morning. As soon as we get off this call, I'm going to figure out what's going on there. Because this federal order seemed pretty clear. There were some exceptions. For instance, things that had been frozen unilaterally by the Trump administration before this most recent stop order seemed like it would still be stopped by what the Trump people had done was massively expand. I mean, in an unprecedented way, with pretty unclear legal standing, the extent of the president's hold on federal funds, and the judge really was very clear that the vast majority of that needs to continue at least until February 3rd. But given all the confusion and given that I've been asking the Trump people, are you complying with this order? And they haven't said so. I think there was a huge sigh of relief from a lot of people yesterday that this crisis would be over. For some, it doesn't seem to be yet. Provisionally, I'll say, because it's still so soon after the order. Maybe things will get sorted out today.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, I think this entire four years will probably be like the last 15 minutes of a horror movie where people keep sighing and thinking that it's over and then boom, like something else comes out of the closet. So, yeah, I would encourage people not to sigh and think that it's over unless, you know, they're trying to draw some type of monster from around the corner. Let's roll a little bit of Caroline Levitt yesterday at the White House, her first White House press briefing, where she did not really kind of settle people's nerves about where this is going. To clarify for a sec what you.

[Murtaza Hussain]

Were saying before on Medicaid.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It wasn't clear to me whether you.

[Murtaza Hussain]

Were saying that no Medicaid would be cut off.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Obviously, a lot of this goes to states before it goes to individuals and so forth. Are you guaranteeing here that no individual now on Medicaid would see a cutoff.

[Murtaza Hussain]

Because of the pause?

[Jeff Stein]

Ms.

[Krystal Ball]

I'll check back on that and get back to you. John. One on the freeze in federal funding, who advised the President on the legality of telling government agencies that they don't have to spend money that was already appropriated by Congress? Well, as the OMB memo states, this is certainly within the confines of the law. So White House counsel's office believes that this is within the President's power to do it and therefore he's doing it. Okay, so they disagree with lawmakers who say that they don't have the power to freeze this funding. Again, I would point you to the language in the memo that clearly states this is within the law.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So let's take the first part first, which is Medicaid. The memo that went out from OMB said that money that's going out to individuals will not be interrupted. It also said none of this should be construed to apply to Social Security or Medicare. They could have added Medicaid and did not. And as one of the reporters there pointed out, because Medicaid flows first, you know, from the federal government to states and then from states to individuals, all these portals ended up going down. The memo did specifically say that it excludes money going from Medicaid to payment providers, but they didn't. But either they forgot the state part or what now the White House is saying it was a screw up and we're gonna fix this. What is the truth here? What can you tell us about how this happened?

[Jeff Stein]

It's a really good question, Ryan, that we're still honestly trying to get to the bottom of. What we don't know precisely is whether, you know, we know for sure that at a minimum they forgot to include in the order this health care program that 70 plus million people rely on for their insurance. And at a minimum, it's clear that this stoppage was precipitated by everything going on in the federal government. What we don't know is, did someone at the Trump White House tell cms, which runs Medicare and Medicaid, stop payments for Medicaid? I think that is not what happened. What seems more likely is that there was a rush amid the confusion of the stop order to this portal, which, you know, typically runs without that much, you know, you know, frenzy. It's sort of just running on autopilot. And when this order went out saying, hey, everybody, like this is, we're, you know, ordering a cessation to federal payments and Medicaid is not included, it may have led to sort of an overwhelming response that effectuated the shutdown of this program. But, but I think the critics would say, and I think maybe somewhat legitimately, it doesn't really matter why. It was clearly left out of their initial order. And clearly the events of the last two days precipitated this shutdown. So the White House not having an answer to that question. It was something that we saw repeatedly in the first Trump administration. He does not really care about the health care programs that serve for Americans. I mean, he tried to massively cut it during his first term and characterize it as getting rid of Obamacare, even though it really is not the same thing. So, yeah, I mean, at a minimum, maybe it looks like negligence.

[Krystal Ball]

Well, yeah, I was going to say, it's so interesting you said that, Jeff, because it did feel like something. Everything is very carefully crafted that we've seen so far. This is the one thing that felt more like 2017, like they just had the. They didn't have their bearings. You know, you can love or hate the policies, but they have, you know, been sort of taken from years of planning at this point, and this one just seemed really haphazard. Let's roll another clip of Caroline Levitt getting questions about the payroll at some of these organizations who felt they may be affected. Again, during yesterday's press briefing, is the.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Trump administration recommending that organizations that rely on federal funding make payroll, pay their rent?

[Krystal Ball]

In the meantime, it is a temporary pause in. The Office of Management and Budget is reviewing the federal funding that has been going out the door, again, not for individual assistance, but for all of these other programs that I mentioned. I also spoke with the incoming director of OMB this morning, and he told me to tell all of you that the line to his office is open for other federal government agencies across the board. And if they feel that programs are necessary and in line with with the president's agenda, then the Office of Management and Budget will review those policies. I think this is a very responsible measure. Again, the past four years, we've seen the Biden administration spend money like drunken sailors. It's a big reason we've had an inflation crisis in this country. And it's incumbent upon this administration to make sure again, that every penny is being accounted for, honestly. So, Jeff, have the people you talk to, do they share that sort of confidence or that they should be able to make payroll and keep the lights on for the next few months? I'm sure the judges order, as we've already talk talked about, helps, but I'm sure they still sort of feel uncomfortable and in some state of limbo.

[Jeff Stein]

Yeah. And just quickly, I laughed when I heard part of that line yesterday because if you listen close to what she's saying, she's saying, I spoke to the budget chair, the budget, incoming budget chief, Russ Bo, the White House whose office is responsible for the federal freeze. And Levitt is saying, he told me to say that the federal agencies should contact me if there's anything essential that they want to keep going. And I found that to be kind of an amazing thing because it's like telling us, the reporters, like, I'm not in charge of a federal agency. You're telling the press secretary to tell the world that the heads of federal agencies should contact the White House, like, those are the president's personnel. And there's the fact that that communication didn't occur well in advance of this order reflected I think kind of an amazing lack of planning. And I guess on a sort of related note, this stop order seems to have been driven my sourcing and what they've said publicly suggests by a feeling that the Biden people had screwed them by sort of funneling money at the door. And to give the Trump people some credit, like, this is not something they made up. Like, there was a real effort by the Biden administration in the last few weeks to say like, whatever money like that we think the Trump people don't want to spend, like, let's just get it out. Let's get it out there. Let's get it out there. And so they were discovering, as they've said, like, I mean, I can't vouch for the accuracy of this, but they said we discovered like condoms for Gaza, which we should true squad that at some point. But like, whatever, that was something that they didn't like. Like there was a real ramp up of that spending. And so that's Ryan's band name is. They said like, no, no, more like we don't we can't track what's going on out from every agency, so let's shut it all down. But then obviously, like, that created this other huge problem.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And I wanted to pick up on another thing that she said in that clip there, which goes to also the second question that she got from the press that we played there about the legality of this question. We can put up the next tear sheet, the A4. This is a piece by Dave Dayen over at the American Prospect, which I suggest everybody read because it kind of makes the case that this stuff is actually not legal. And the line that I wanted to get your response to from what we just heard her say was that she was going to approve or the White House would approve congressionally directed spending that was, quote, in line with the President's agenda, unquote. That's the key point there. People might think, like, okay, we had a presidential election, we elected Donald Trump. He has an agenda. He should get to then direct spending in line with his agenda. And that is certainly a kind of political system that you could design and that people might support and think is a good way to run a country. That's not the country that we have. Like, what we have is we have a Congress where you have two senators from every state and then you have for about 7 or 800,000 people in a particular state, they're represented by an individual and they represent that area. They go to Congress, they hash out spending bills down to the decimal points. They then pass it and then the President signs it, and then the president has to then follow the law. Like you say, we want $13.65 million for this duck estuary in Long Island. It's not up to the President to change that. It's like that's what Congress did. And so for her to say that they would only approve spending that is, quote, in line with the President's agenda strikes me as flagrantly unconstitutional and illegal. Like, it's not, it's, you know, it's not up to her or them to say that this, if they don't like it, they gotta veto it. So I'm curious because you would also flag this interesting post from a legal scholar. We can put up a nine so people can find it. This is on the well respected Balkanization blog where he kind of lays out the points, the kind of elements within the Impoundment Control act that allow you to actually pause funding. And the only ones are, quote, to provide for contingencies or to achieve savings made possible by or through changes in requirements or greater efficiency of operations. So in other words, the only way, the only reason the White House can pause funding is because if they think they can do it slightly more efficiently, it said, quote, no officer or employee of the United States may defer any budget authority for any other purpose. So how do you, how, how is the White House squaring this?

[Jeff Stein]

Well, you know, this whole topic. Impoundments, appropriations, the White House Budget act, the Impoundment and Control Act. It is so laden with obscure jargon that nobody has ever heard of. And yet, as you're saying, Ryan, this is a fundamental question about the balance of power, the rule of law, the question of whether our president has unchecked authority to overrule existing law and do what he wants. I mean, that is sort of the core of this issue, beyond all the sort of technical legal jargon that you sort of do have to understand to wrap your head around what's going on here. And the White House has been very clear for a long time. I mean, the Trump people have been saying this since the end of 2019, when we had the impeachment hearing over the Ukraine aid holds. Their view is that the 1974 Budget and Control, Budget and Impoundment Control act, something like that, is unconstitutional. That after Nixon's resignation, after the Watergate scandal, Congress enacted a law that dictates and lays out very clearly. The blog post that you just referenced sort of lays out in this specific instance how the president can pause funding when he can or she can cancel funding, exactly the parameters of this relationship, this crucial relationship overspending between Congress and the White House. And what Russ Vote, the budget chair, and Trump and his top deputy, Mark Paoletta, who's now the general counsel at omb, what they have said is that they do not think that that law adheres to the Constitution and that therefore they are not bound to follow it. And I'll just stress here, this was about pausing funding. And in many ways, pausing funding is a small precursor to what the Trump people have said that they have the prerogative to do, which is not merely to pause funding, but to cancel it. To say, congress told us to spend this money, but we will not. They have been arguing that the amount of money that Congress approves is not a ceiling on the amount of money they can, is not a floor on the amount of money they can spend, but a ceiling. So as long as they're below what Congress tells them to spend, they are in compliance with the law. And now, obviously, like most legal scholars who study this, disagree with that they have a very distinctive view. And I would note, like not a particularly conservative view.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right.

[Jeff Stein]

This is a, about massively expanding the president's power. So this is not small C conservatism. This is an attempt to really exert much more control out of the executive branch in a way that defies a law that's been in effect for four or five decades.

[Krystal Ball]

Although. So the small counterpoint from the right would argue that what they would say is that Congress should take accountability of policies coming out of the executive branch. I'm sure you hear this all the time, Jeff, when you're talking to people. That's the argument that Mark Paletta and Russ Vought would make, is that it's expanding the power of the executive to sort of make Congress do its job or what they believe its job should be. A Congress punts a lot of stuff to the executive branch now. But anyway, we don't have to get into that.

[Jeff Stein]

No, I mean, I think that's exactly right. And it's also, it comes in the context of the Biden administration in numerous instances, saying we should have more authority to do something that, for instance, you know, expand, cancel student loan debt that the court said violated the law. And so the willingness of presidents to defy congressional statutes seems to be in part a bipartisan trend. I still think this is beyond what we've seen, definitely. But they are correct. I think that before the 1974 budget law, presidents did act with much more authority to cancel spending without congressional approval. And they are also right that the federal debt has grown to $36 trillion. And even though this, the funding they're targeting is not the fundamental part of that, there is waste and fraud in the federal government. And it raises, I think, a somewhat legitimate question of if the government discovers that money that Congress has approved is wasteful, should they have to spend it anyway? Essentially, Right. On the flip side, like, then that takes the power away from Congress to make the decision about what is wasteful.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah. And it's, I mean, and it seems to me like people in the Russ Vote Mark Paoletta camp understand that this is going to be kicked to the courts and are kind of eager to see how the courts decide on these questions. Let's put up some of the democratic response here. A5 Obviously, the democratic attorneys generals have put together their efforts to, as Politico says, quote, urgently resist the freeze. This is a statement from the Rhode island attorney general, Peter Naronha, who said it is astonishing that President Trump, through an agency most Americans have never heard of would take an action so clearly unlawful that would impact so many Americans in so many ways. And if we go to the next element, this is a six. This is a post from Alex Pfeiffer, who is a deputy assistant to the president and principal deputy comms director. He says this was in the OMB memo or the OMB like memo. After the memo that explained, quote, mandatory programs like Medicaid and SNAP will continue without pause. But again, that is a question Caroline Levitt didn't seem to have a clear answer to. After the post that Pfeiffer is going for, there came out Jeff. Right. Do I have the sequence correct on that? It was pretty interesting, that memo. After the memo came out, then the White House press briefing happened, and then they still didn't have a clear answer. And this brings us to A8, which is an article that Jeff, Jeff, you wrote last June about Trump plans to claim sweeping powers to cancel federal spending. This is something that has been in the works. This is like an ideological crafted in a conservative laboratory. Literally.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Always read Jeff Stein.

[Krystal Ball]

Always read Jeff Stein and Dave Dayen's piece. I think a lot of people on the right at the American Prospect would read that and say, yes, they would disagree that it was unlawful, but they would say, yes, this is the radical, revolutionary measure that we are taking. What's your, I guess, perspective on why a policy that's been thought about for so long was rolled out? I think, at best, sloppily.

[Jeff Stein]

Yeah. I think it's the core thing driving this to me seemed to have been Stephen Miller was on TV yesterday saying, we kept on hearing that we'd spent money that we didn't know was going out the door on gauze and condoms or whatever. And I think that sort of fueled some of the sloppiness. I mean, the White House was like, if you read the order they sent out Monday night that we reported on Monday night, the way it is read, like, the actual words used specifically state that all federal grants will be paused, including but not limited to dei, Clean energy, all this stuff that they don't like. The next day, their memo said the only thing affected by this pause are spending programs not compliant with our prior executive orders on dei, like green energy, et cetera, et cetera. Huge difference between one and two.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right.

[Jeff Stein]

Like, one is saying we shut down everything. Then we evaluate it, and whatever is found in compliance with REOs will be allowed to go. The second day is we will shut down only the things that are found to be in violations of our EOs. They, you know, it was like, how do you guys not understand, like, that these are, like, the same thing. We haven't changed our messages, like, blah, blah, blah. I don't know what to tell you guys.

[Murtaza Hussain]

Like, I didn't write these memos.

[Jeff Stein]

Like, I am just reading. They're, like, very clear. Like, day one said that, day two said that. So, like, it's. It's confusing. Like, it's not.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's not.

[Jeff Stein]

It's not us. It's not the press. And it's frustrating because, like, I don't know. I don't know how to. I don't want to get myself in trouble here. But I think, like, for a lot of reporters, myself included, we know that the Trump people think that we're unfair, that they think we're biased, that they think we're, like, all liberals out to get them. And I have been working very hard to be like, I am reporting the facts. I am figuring out what's happening. I am giving you guys, you know, a totally fair hearing in all my stories. Like, I want to. I want to. I don't want to be demagogued as someone who's just out here doing Trump derangements syndrome stuff. Like, I think that's really important for the media to, like, not get sucked into every, like, thing that might not be true. I mean, to just make it a very obvious point. And. But then I'm in this instance where it's just like, they're telling everyone that we're lying. And it's like, I've been reading what you guys are putting out, and it's confusing and it's hurting people, and it's not saying what you said it says. So it's like, what am I supposed to do with. You know what I mean? Does that make sense?

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. Actually, before you got on here, Emily and I were talking about how. Or I was saying this. I'm not gonna put this in Emily's mouth, but I was saying that because there has been genuine Trump derangement syndrome from significant elements of the mainstream media. Now, whenever the Trump administration screws up and actually does something like shut down all the Medicaid portals around the country, maybe accidentally, they respond by saying, oh, this is another MSM hoax. Don't believe the msm. This isn't happening. This is them lying again. And it's like, you can't say that all the time. Like, everybody makes mistakes, and that's being generous. I think I'm being generous here in calling this potentially a mistake. Meanwhile, so I Completely understand what you're saying. You're trying to give them a fair shake, and they are actually doing this very confusing thing and then saying that they didn't do it. You're like, well, how? There's no way to fairly report that and make you sound good, like, you messed this up. Meanwhile, I'm totally bracing myself for the Supreme Court to come in and say that it was illegal for the Biden administration to underline the point that you were making earlier. Illegal for the Biden administration to restructure loan payments around student debt. But it is totally legal for a President Trump to just do what he wants with the money that Congress directed. How confident are your sources in the Trump world that the supreme is gonna meet them somewhere on this and give them new powers? Or are they going on that theory where. Well, the worst thing that happens is we get our policy for a couple months or a couple years, and then it gets shut down and we just keep doing it?

[Jeff Stein]

I'm honestly not sure. I mean, the people I was talking to last summer, you know, they have ties to Clarence Thomas and the conservatives on the court, and I think they feel pretty good about a few of them.

[Krystal Ball]

But Mark, Carol clerked for Clarence.

[Jeff Stein]

Yeah, exactly. Mark Paoletta, who's the lawyer at the budget office, he knows Thomas very Well. There's been ProPublica reporting about them doing trips together and stuff. So I'm guessing this is a guess, but I'm guessing that they have a pretty good feeling of where Thomas is. But you win Clarence Thomas, and so what? You still need the rest. At least several other Supreme Court justices, because that said, I think the capacity or possibility that the Trump people just ignore the court order, I could not get a straight answer, to reiterate last night, what they consider whether they would abide by what the judge said, this federal judge had said, and for all the comparisons we were making with the Biden student loan order, if the Trump people are just going to straight up ignore what the federal court say. I'm not saying they have yet, but if that's what they're going to do. We are in really different territory in terms of just defying a court order. I mean, we haven't seen that really since, I don't know, Lincoln and habeas corpus and ignoring the Supreme Court during the Civil War. I'm not a historian, obviously, but that would be a huge change in shock. So the speed and blase nature in which they did this, to me, suggests that they might be willing to try sort of ignoring the courts.

[Krystal Ball]

And I should correct myself. Mark didn't clerk for Clarence Thomas. He was sort of a Sherpa in the confirmation for Clarence Thomas, but has been around those circles for a long time.

[Jeff Stein]

Oh, thank you.

[Krystal Ball]

So, yeah, that's an interesting, that's a really interesting point, actually. The makeup of the Supreme Court is like tailor made if you would want to have a decision. If you're a conservative, who would want to have something like this litigated right now in front of the Supreme Court. So, Jeff, this is super, super, super interesting. Thank you so much for joining us and sticking with us for like a whole half hour to go through all of this crazy news.

[Jeff Stein]

My pleasure, guys. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

[Sagar Enjeti]

All right, good luck. And up next, he was talking about that Stephen Miller Jake Tapper interview. Well, they also fought over immigration. We'll talk about that in a second. Amazon One Medical presents Painful Thoughts. I could catch anything sitting in this doctor's waiting room.

[Krystal Ball]

Ugh, I could.

[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Krystal Ball]

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and also Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller was brawling with Jake Tapper on CNN yesterday evening. They touched on what we talked about earlier on the federal aid, loans and grants and all of that, but also really got into an interesting exchange over the Trump administration's immigration policy. Let's take a listen.

[Jeff Stein]

Listen.

[Sagar Enjeti]

How do you, how does President Trump make sure that the effort to deport people who are not in this country legally doesn't end up hurting Americans who want safe borders. Absolutely. But also don't want to see even more higher prices in groceries? Well, I mean, I'm sure it's not your position, Jake. You're just asking the question that we should supply America's food with exploitative illegal aliens in labor. I obviously don't think that's what you're implying. Only 1% of alien workers in the entire country work in agriculture. The top destination for illegal aliens are large cities like New York, like Los Angeles, and small industrial towns, of course, all across the heartland. As we've seen with the Biden floods, none of those illegal aliens are doing farm work. Those 30,000 legal aliens that Joe Biden dumped into Springfield. Yeah, I'm talking about the ones that are. No, no, no, but, no, no, but I'm explaining this. It's important to understand. Now you're kind of changing the subject. I mean, I'm the ones. I will go, I will. Give me 30 minutes. I'll go as deep as you want. This audience, I don't have a third. I'm talking about the ones that could, that work in the agriculture industry. You can come back and we talk about the ones in the cities. I swear I'll do the whole answer. The illegal aliens that Joe Biden brought into our country are not, full stop doing farm work. They are not the illegal aliens he brought in from Venezuela, from Haiti, from Nicaragua. They are not doing farm work. They are in our cities collecting welfare. As for the farmers, there is a guest worker program that President Trump supports. Over time as well, we will transition into automation, so we'll never have to have this conversation ever again. But there's no universe in which this nation is going to allow the previous president to flood our nation with millions and millions of illegal aliens who just get to stay here. And we are especially not going to allow a subset of those illegal aliens to rape and murder our citizens. So we are going to unapologetically enforce our immigration laws. And as I'm sure you will celebrate, we are going to unleash the power and might of the US Government to eradicate the presence of transnational threats on our soil.

[Krystal Ball]

Now, of course, the criminal status or non criminal status of people who are being deported was a topic at the first White House press briefing yesterday, which was absolutely packed. Let's take a look at how Caroline Levitt responded to some questions about that. 500 arrests ICE has made so far since President Trump came back into office. Can you just tell us the numbers? How many have a criminal record versus those who are just in the country illegally? Ms. All of them because they illegally broke our nation's laws and therefore they are criminals. As far as this administration goes, I know the last administration didn't see it that way. So it's a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal. But that's exactly what they are.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The worst worst.

[Krystal Ball]

They all have a criminal record and wealth of if they broke our nation's laws. Yes. Okay. So, Ryan, there's an interesting debate happening right now about what constitutes criminal, because it is, under US Code, a crime. But it's a misdemeanor to cross the border illegally. It's not a felony. If you repeat which many people have. It is a felony, but it is still technically a misdemeanor. So, you know, you're sort of getting into a semantics game.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And then the extra layer of semantics is that overstaying a visa is a civil infraction.

[Krystal Ball]

Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And many, many, maybe most of the people who are here illegally are here because they overstayed a visa, which technically actually is just a civil offense, not even a misdemeanor. The misdemeanor comes from crossing the border without the right papers or making.

[Krystal Ball]

Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So, and then I guess the question is, if you commit a misdemeanor, are you a criminal? I mean, how many misdemeanors have you committed? Probably a lot.

[Krystal Ball]

I think I jaywalked on the way in. Right. So it gets into this sort of semantic game. But Trump did repeatedly say that this would be about violent criminals. And so right now, what everyone's trying to do is kind of parse the amount of people who are violent criminals versus who just committed the misdemeanor of entering the country illegally. The Washington Post. We can put this next Forbes tear sheet up on the screen. Forbes kind of was running down what numbers we have. And found in the Washington Post that ICE officials have been directed by Trump officials to aggressively ramp up the number of people they arrest from a few hundred per day to at least 1200-1500, because the president has been disappointed with the results of his mass deportation. So these are quotas. And quotas, obviously, is how you end up with a different kind of. Or you end up up with percentages of violent criminals versus kind of regular people who committed the misdemeanor crime of coming to the country illegally. Then you can't guarantee that you're only sweeping up violent criminals. As soon as you're saying we have to have 1500 daily deportations, it just gets a lot harder, obviously.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right. And you can see Trump's mind working where he's like, I keep being told there were 12, 12 to 15 million illegals who, like, flooded into the country in the last four years, and we're removing a few hundred a day. Trump can do the math on that. Those are two wildly different sets of scales. And so if he had people around him who were honest, they would have told him, this is basically what we're capable of. And he has had people around him who have said, if you want to do this in the way that you see it, you're going to need to basically send the military into American cities all at once. There are factions on the right that want to see that happen. But I think even Trump is like, okay, that's pushing it a little bit, much like the. The, like, black jackets and the black boots, that's one thing. The green ones going around the city, like, maybe against BLM protesters, but, like, just raiding, like, the Home Depot parking lot, like, that starts to look ridiculous. And also the fact that they're being so coy about the criminal records of the people that they're rounding up suggests an inherent acknowledgement among all sides of the debate here that there isn't actually an enormous amount of support for kind of violently deporting, aggressively deporting people whose only crime, if you want to call it that, is coming here illegally. There might be kind of polls say. Polls might say, yeah, we think people should be here legally. But then. And it seems like even the Trump administration knows that physically dragging people out of. Done anything wrong, that's why they want to find people with these criminal records, why they're at the very top of. We didn't play it, but at the very top of this White House press briefing, she started by saying they'd arrested, what, a Dominican guy who had murdered his mother and her child or something. Those are the ones that the Trump administration wanted to then kind of allude to. Oh, Democrats are okay with that. When really, if Democrats had any sense, they would have been going after people like that internally. And to some extent they were. But not. They wouldn't kind of make a big deal of it. Well, yeah, like, Biden wouldn't have bragged that they had done it, which is crazy. Like, you catch a murderer actually. Like, that's the number one thing a politician likes to celebrate. It's catching a murderer. Like, entire careers are made off of that. Yeah, that's what you do.

[Krystal Ball]

Doesn't get any better than that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

No.

[Krystal Ball]

Well, so speaking of the optics, let's take a look at this next clip of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. I can't believe I'm even saying DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on the streets of New York City yesterday. You can see her. She tweets 7am in NYC, getting the dirtbags off the streets. She's got, I'm gonna get criticized for saying still up, but she's got a blowout, she's got her outfit on and she is ready to go.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You know, Ryan, is that a still up look? Like usually people 7am in New York City with their hair looking like that.

[Krystal Ball]

She just went out the night before and went straight to the ice rink.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Those bars are open very late in New York.

[Krystal Ball]

I don't know what she was up to, but she looked great, I'll give her that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And she was checking out kitchens at bars until 6am and then checking the restaurant inspections. Yeah, she's looking for bussers and bar backs.

[Krystal Ball]

So 7am in NYC, getting the dirtbags off the streets. To your point, I will say we've all seen the polling recently. New York Times Ipsos had a poll just the day before the inauguration last week about how Americans support the concept of mass deportations. That isn't the only poll that's found that if you just ask people right now about whether they support mass deportations, the answer to that is yes. And it's possible that dips a little bit more as the media starts focusing on as the Trump administration starts focusing on deportations, and then the media starts focusing on that. Those things are all entirely possible. But they're.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And that goes to my point. I think I don't have any evidence for this, but I just feel like the people who are answering that kind of want a snap of the finger. Like, okay, we didn't really see those people come in. Except we saw some images at the border and we don't really want to see them leave. But I agree that they should leave. Like, that's the kind of right, like, support for that. But when it gets ugly, you might see that slip. We'll see.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah. No, I mean, optics wise, you want to. I mean, the Kristi Noem thing, you can see exactly why people who look at what happened, for example, Lake and Riley, would say, yeah, like, hell, yeah, let's get out of there. Let's get people out of here. If they have prior criminal convictions and they do so. This is from the Associated press. As of July 21, ICE said 662,556 people under its supervision were either convicted of crimes or faced criminal charges. Nearly 15,000 were in its custody, but the vast majority were not. Included in the figures of people not detained by ICE were people found guilty of very serious crimes. 13,000 for homicide, 15,000 for sexual assault, 13,000 for weapons offenses, and 2,663 for stolen vehicle. The single biggest category, though, was for traffic related offenses at 77,000, followed by assault at 62,000 and dangerous drugs at 56,000. But those numbers on that we just went through here of homicide, sexual assault, weapons, stolen vehicles, assault, those are really, really high numbers.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right, but it gets. Puts you at what, 100,000 or so.

[Krystal Ball]

Right. I was just going to say, if you want to do that, if you want to do 1500 on a daily basis of only the most violent criminals, that quota is gonna put you in a position where there are, you know, just people who aren't the most violent criminals still.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And we're being told that there's 20 million people we need to get out of the country, and that's 100,000. Like, what about the other 19 million, 900,000? That's the part that's gonna get interesting.

[Krystal Ball]

That is the part that's getting interesting. Yeah, that is the part for sure. Because for Donald Trump right now, some of the toughest questions that he faced between his election and his inauguration were, are you going to be rounding up, like, families and kids that came here were brought here illegally over the course of the Biden administration.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And this goes back to that Stephen Miller clip that we started with, where Miller does this kind of logical kind of fallacy where he says he's asked about agricultural workers and he understands there's another implicit kind of agreement between Tapper and Miller there, that most Americans don't want ICE going into the lettuce fields and rounding everybody up and hauling them to Mexico. And so instead of defending that, what Miller says is, well, actually, most of the people that are here illegally and that were allowed in by Biden were dumped in the cities and they're not out there picking the fields. That's not the point. The question is about the agricultural workers. And Tapper said, oh, you're changing the subject. He's like, how dare you change the subject? And the right kind of loves that Miller's giving it to Tapper, and Tapper's fans love that he's, like, standing up to Miller. But what gets lost in conversation, they are talking about. They're talking about genuinely two different things.

[Krystal Ball]

Yes.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. So then Miller says, well, we have a guest worker program. And this is where I get so frustrated in the immigration conversation, because I am a big supporter of guest worker programs that smoothly allow people who, you know, if you've got a country where, you know, you've got a lot of laborers in Mexico who want to work these jobs, like in the fields of California, but don't actually want to live here. Like, they like Mexico. Their roots are there, their family is there, their community is there, but they want to come for four or five months. Like, that used to be how it was done in the 70s and 80s. And then we cracked down and we closed the border. And so all the people that were doing that told their families and their communities just come up here. Because now it's too expensive to go back and forth across the border. The idea that there's a functional guest worker program that can be used at scale by our agriculture industry is just not true. And if Miller supports that, great. Put it back into law and make that the law. And then you can raise questions. Are they exploited? Okay, if they are exploited, they're now legal. They can join a union, the inspectors can come out and make sure that things are going well and the pay that they're going to be getting is so much. Is relatively so much better. But that's just thrown as a. And then he says, oh, and we're going to use automation to get rid of that soon anyway. But all of it is actually just a way to avoid the actual conversation.

[Krystal Ball]

I think he got Tapper pretty good when Tapper was asking him about, like, I forget exactly what Tapper. What description Tapper used, but, like lettuce. Is that what they were talking about? Like, lettuce? Something to that extent, yeah. And Miller came back and was like, so this is just about, like, bringing in an underclass of people too. Like, that Was. I thought that was pretty excellent rebuttal. I see what you're saying, that it's on a different.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It is. And Tapper should be like, like. Or. But Tapper's. Well, actually, the other side should say, yes, it is actually. Like, we don't have people. You can't. We've got this economic problem where we need people to do these jobs for wages that are less than you can actually live a dignified life in the United States.

[Krystal Ball]

But we don't need that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And so the way you can do that is. Well, they don't actually live in the United States. They only live here for four months. They work here, make a good amount of money. Like, just like H2B people come over here, wait tables for four months and then go back to Poland or whatever. And they made good money for Poland or they made good money for Romania. Is that the best system we could design in the world? No, but otherwise the price of lettuce is going to double. And see how people like that.

[Krystal Ball]

Well, Miller will have to own that. Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. I don't disagree that it causes price increases, but I don't think we all need to. I think when people look at this.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Problem is people like Taber won't say, yeah, actually, you're right. And we need. So it's going to be two tier, and the second tier is people that don't actually live here. They just come here and then they go back. And then over time, hopefully you can then develop a more equitable economy where you're raising the living standards of everywhere.

[Krystal Ball]

Well, the disorderly process over the last few years has definitely made exploitation a lot easier, which is why they've actually just, like, lost a certain number of even, like, children who have gone into the labor system. The New York Times did a great expose on how many kids were being, like, forced into exploitive labor. And then we just lost custody of them. I think it was Mayorkas. It was like DHS just lost custody of them. And part of that is because our system was so overwhelmed and disorderly. And so I think the Trump administration's best argument probably is not just, you know, people are here and they shouldn't be here. We've lost track of them. We need to adjudicate their asylum claims. If they made do asylum claims, adjudicate those, get the violent criminals out, but then also have some system that makes sense. And that is way harder than actually deporting people. And we can talk about that, too, with all of the other sort of radical reforms. The Trump administration is doing that first step is kind of the easiest. It's politically the hardest. But then rebuilding a system afterwards is. Is definitely going to be really difficult.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Amazon One Medical Presents Painful Thoughts I could catch anything sitting in this doctor's waiting room. Okay, just wiped his runny nose on my jacket and the guy next to me sitting in a pool of perspiration insists on sharing my armrest. Next time, make an appointment with an Amazon One medical provider. There's no way to. And no sweaty guy. Amazon One Medical healthcare just got less painful. Bobby Bones here. Join me on the new Top Shelf country Cruise. It sails February 2026 aboard the luxury Celebrity Reflection, stopping at St. Kitts and Nevis and also St. Martin. There'll be live music with top tier country artists and I'll be performing as well. Go to topshelfcountrycruise.com before January 30th and register for the free Friends of Bobby Presale. No deposits required and you get early access to the best staterooms. Did you know that parents rank financial.

[Krystal Ball]

Literacy as the number one most difficult.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families. With Greenlight, you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores automate allowance, and keep an eye on what your kids are spending. With real time notifications, kids learn to earn, save and spend wisely. And parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place. Try Greenlight Risk free [e-mail] iheart let's.

[Krystal Ball]

Move on to the Michigan Senate race that suddenly opened up yesterday. Nobody really expected Gary Peters to step down. He's a pretty run of the mill, conventional, well liked establishment Democrat, wouldn't you say? Right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, he's very like, unions are cool with him. He's like a rank and file politician who like worked his way up. Now he's a senator. Probably sit there for life, but you know, you only make what, $174,000 a year as a senator?

[Krystal Ball]

Boring.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You spend all your time with incredibly rich people doing like the coolest rich people things. Yeah. And at some point you're like, wait a minute, if I have power over these people, they're asking me for things, yet I got no money. Yet here I am with $20 million in my campaign account, but I can't spend it on myself. Let me just cash out of here, start making a couple million dollars a year for 10 years and just really live large. I don't know what he's gonna do we'll see. Yeah. I wouldn't expect anything different.

[Krystal Ball]

Right? No, but it did take everybody by surprise that he announced. Peters announced his retirement yesterday. And if we Skip here to C2, we can put this access report up on former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is, quote, taking a serious look at running for Peter's seat. This is from a person close to Buttigieg. Quote, pete is exploring all of his options on how he can be helpful and continue to serve. He's honored to be mentioned for this, and he's taken a serious look. What I love about that quote, Ryan, is I hope the person who said he's honored to be mentioned for this is the one who mentioned him for this.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Smith. Yeah.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, probably. Yes, probably. It was probably like, hey, Pete, let's call up Axios and just say we're honored to be mentioned, and that will create the mention of us.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The thing about Pete is his consultants probably don't even have to tell him that he's on the ball.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, this guy is.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He's wanted this for a very long time. So. Yeah, so it'll be. Mayor Pete, how is the Republican field looking over there? I mean.

[Krystal Ball]

I mean, they keep.

[Sagar Enjeti]

They keep losing to very seemingly beatable Democrats with pretty good candidates.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah. Well.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And, yeah, they've won two out of the last three presidential cycles.

[Jeff Stein]

Right.

[Krystal Ball]

Close races.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But on the gubernatorial level and the Senate level, they just get waxed.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, it's a really good point because. And I actually just wrote a piece about Alissa Slotkin yesterday and her very close race. It was very close race. Very culturally.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, that's true. She eked it out.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah. And she actually had an interesting campaign on abortion, which is where Mallory McMorrow, who many people remember, was sort of conspicuously posting. She went really viral. This was a couple of years ago, and it was about. Correct me if I think it was about, like, banned books, quote, unquote, banned books, something like that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And wasn't she like a Mike staffer or something like.

[Krystal Ball]

Oh, was she? I didn't even know that she was, like, a state. Yeah, she was. Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Krystal Ball]

But she.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So she's Brooklyn hipster who moved back.

[Krystal Ball]

To Michigan, moved back home.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Krystal Ball]

Many such cases.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Gave a great speech. Yes. Went viral. Yeah.

[Krystal Ball]

Many such cases. She seems to have political ambitions and could be a rival to Buttigieg in this race. Weigel was. Dave Weigel was quoting her tweets, wishing Gary Peters a happy retirement yesterday with interest.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And her problem is she is in the same lane as Buttigieg, kind of the woke leaning center left where you're not in the Bernie Lane. And the way you differentiate yourself from establishment Democrats is you're more aggressive in how you fight on behalf of cultural issues. And I don't think you could beat Pete on that because he's just the best at that. But who knows? We'll see.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And maybe Pete keeps his powder dry for 2028.

[Krystal Ball]

This is back to who Republicans possibly have. I mean. Yeah, maybe he does. Although he could still technically, I guess he could run in 2028.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You could just kind of weird. Kind of weird. Like you're going from your swearing in to Iowa. Yeah, well, they don't do Iowa anymore.

[Krystal Ball]

Right, that's right. But so Elissa Slotkin is out here talking to, for example, the Free Press, Barry Weiss's publication, about how Democrats just need to get back to being quote, unquote, normal and how she is the kind of normal person whisperer because she eked out this Michigan Senate race by talking about the economy and blah, blah, blah, which, by the way, really isn't true. She sort of tried to pivot to that. But when she was in the House of Representatives was pretty eagerly leaning into some of these. Like she was the co sponsor. I think she may have even, even been the sponsor of the George Floyd justice and policing.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Well, everyone was for that.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, everyone was for that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right.

[Krystal Ball]

But she, like really leaned into it, took the initiative on it. So anyway, CIA, right? Oh, yeah. So like let's. I mean, it's a tough race for Republicans because Democrats in Michigan are just smarter than Democrats in different parts of the country. They're forced to be because Michigan is a. Has an interesting demographic profile of the people that Democrats are losing. So they kind of got to that question first. But it'll be an interesting race for sure. Less interesting probably than Vivek Ramaswamy Sheeta Saleeb run. Yeah, Less interesting than Vivek Ramaswamy is Ohio run because, I mean, he has to get out of primary. The primary is where it would be interesting. General election would be less interesting.

[Sagar Enjeti]

How hooked is he because of his Urkel tweet? He got him thrown out of doja. Yeah.

[Krystal Ball]

Let's take a look at his interview with Charlamagne, the God on Breakfast Club where Charlamagne really laid in him.

[Jeff Stein]

Do you think you were pushed out.

[Murtaza Hussain]

Of those because Trump rolled back the DEI initiatives?

[Sagar Enjeti]

No, to the contrary. And you know, I would say, just to be super clear about, I have no, I have no problem with, you know, framing or whatever it was really just an actual mutual decision. Where you look at here was one vision on approach, Here's a different vision on an approach. That's great. There's no right or wrong answer. With a technology driven approach and a technology first approach, there's no better person than Elon to run with that, with a constitutional law focus, with a legislation focus. Some of the areas I was focused on, probably the right place to do it, is elected office. And so we all agreed on that. And I think that that's actually a good thing where we're able to. Where we're actually able to collaborate. Divide and conquer.

[Krystal Ball]

I hear you, Vivek.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I don't believe you, but I think, I think you either got pushed out.

[Jeff Stein]

Or you know that it's going to implode.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I think that, you know, Elon is.

[Krystal Ball]

Going to crash and burn it.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And you're a smart guy and you.

[Krystal Ball]

Said, you know what, what, Let me.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Get out of Dodge and go do.

[Krystal Ball]

My governor Ohio thing.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So look, here's exactly. I knew that the right step for me in the long run is elected office and to pursue the vision that we're talking about here, to actually translate that to action in my own terms, that's what I've been called to do. It was clear that I could not do that and serve on DOGE at the same time, even for logistical reasons. It came to be in the government rather than an outside body. I was proud to be able to spend the first couple of months offering my contributions and setting it in the right direction with its focus now with its digital technology focus. No better person to do that than Elon in the way that he's going to lead it. And I am hopeful that there's going to be a lot of streamlining of government bureaucracy that comes out of that. And I'm pursuing my next steps at the state level. Are they going to endorse you? Is Elon going to endorse you? We're on. We're all on very good terms. And so I, I wouldn't want to speak for anybody else, but I will say that they are very supportive of the decision that I made to pursue as my next step.

[Krystal Ball]

Yes, I'm sure they are very supportive of the decision for that next step. He is going to need a better answer to that question. He's smooth, but way too smooth there, right? That was some real politician talk.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The part that was absurd to me was when he said he can't run for office and also serve on this Doge committee. It's like, wait, A minute. Elon Musk is tweeting 24 hours a day, faking being a good video game player, running SpaceX, running X, Tesla, running Tesla.

[Krystal Ball]

Neuralink.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Neuralink.

[Krystal Ball]

There's a little SolarCity still part in his AI company.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So you can do all this, but you can't run for Senate and also go after seniors or whatever?

[Krystal Ball]

Well, it's the digital technology focus, so.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That was the substance of it. I'm curious if you have any insight into how serious that dispute was between them. What he seems to be suggesting is that Elon Musk is going to focus on technology, basically, I guess, trying to analyze where. Using algorithms, analyze where money is being spent, and then using a scalpel or a sledgehammer to go after them. Right now he's going with a sledgehammer. You know, we talked about in the A block with, you know, asking for every federal worker to, you know, consider taking this buyout. Whereas Vivek was saying that he would prefer a constitutional law approach and passing legislation. On the one hand, you could read that as some shade of like, I'm actually going to try to do this legally. Like, we have a system set up where people vote for representatives who pass laws and then implement them. And I'm going to do it within that system.

[Krystal Ball]

By the way, that's the entire point of what Russ Vote is trying to do at omb.

[Sagar Enjeti]

So he's get rid of the representative democracy.

[Krystal Ball]

No, it's to force Congress to actually pass laws or take them away from the executive branch in the way that Elon Musk is trying to use executive powers.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Right, Except Congress already did pass laws. Russ just doesn't like them.

[Krystal Ball]

That delegated the funding to the executive branch.

[Sagar Enjeti]

They did not delegate funding. It directed the funding.

[Krystal Ball]

The agency shall.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It's like if you have an Uber driver, did you delegate your destination to the Uber driver or did you direct the Uber driver? What if the Uber driver's like, yeah, 401 Ninth Street? Nah. How about 901 Fourth Street?

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, this is going to the Supreme Court.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Like, no, there's two different branches here. The branch who's the driver directed the Uber driver and sent the money.

[Krystal Ball]

This exact.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Your job is to just drive the Uber.

[Krystal Ball]

This exact argument is being. I think one of the reasons. One of the things that Vote is doing is this is designed to go to the Supreme Court to actually hash out its impoundment.

[Sagar Enjeti]

We can talk and we did talk about this.

[Krystal Ball]

We talked about this with, with Jeff, but we should add Ramaswamy. This is according to a local Cleveland Paper is actually expected to announce his governor bid in mid February. So just in a matter of weeks. Makes sense. Then when I was going on Breakfast Club. And he's brought on some advisors from the governor, J.D. vance's political team. Yeah, governor. Yeah, governor. Yep. So he will be in that primary with the attorney general, Dave Yost, and the treasurer, Robert Sprague. And I actually think getting out of that primary is really going to be the tough one for him. It's not guaranteed at all.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And I wonder if he's gonna have to face questions about that Alzheimer's scam he did. Again, like in any reasonable society, he's in prison. Right. Right now for people who don't know. And we talked about this. Now it's cool to talk about on the. Right. We talked about it years ago. He bought an Alzheimer's drug that had already failed its FDA trials a bunch of times. Did his Ramaswamy hype to it, which pumped the stock up really high. Promised like, oh, man, this is going to be amazing. Hired all his family, pulled the rug out, took all his money out, and then, then the FDA rejects it for, like, the fourth time. And everybody who put money in based on his hype lost.

[Krystal Ball]

Right. It's one thing to run in a national political or a national presidential primary. It's another thing to run in a very localized race where those questions are just. It's just sharper because there's less national noise. So I expect that'll be a pretty significant part.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah.

[Krystal Ball]

All right, let's move on to Jim Acosta's departure from cnn.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Amazon One Medical presents Painful Thoughts. I could catch anything sitting in this doctor's waiting room. Okay. Just wiped his runny nose on my jacket and the guy next to me sitting in a pool of perspiration insists on sharing my armrest. Next time, make an appointment with an Amazon One medical provider. There's no waiting and no sweaty guy. Amazon One Medical Healthcare just got less painful. Bobby Bones here. Join me on the new Top Shelf country Cruise. It sails February 2026 aboard the luxury Celebrity Reflection, stopping at St. Kitts and Nevis and also St. Martin. There'll be live music with top tier country artists, and I'll be performing as well. Go to topshelfcountrycruise.com before January 30th and register for the free Friends of Bobby Presale. No deposits required. And you get early access to the best staterooms. Did you know that parents rank financial.

[Krystal Ball]

Literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to Teach Meet Greenlight, the.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Debit card and money app for families. With Greenlight, you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores automate allowance, and keep an eye on what your kids are spending. With real time notifications, kids learn to earn, save and spend wisely. And parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money. With guardrails in place, try Greenlight Risk free [e-mail] iheart CNN anchor Jim Acosta is out. Let's watch his sign off. I just wanted to end today's show by thanking all of the wonderful people who work behind the scenes at this network. You may have seen some reports about me and the show, and after giving all of this some careful consideration and weighing an alternative time slot CNN offered me, I've decided to move on. I am grateful to CNN for the nearly 18 years I've spent here doing the news. People often ask me if the highlight of my career at CNN was at the White House covering Donald Trump. Actually, no. That moment came here when I covered former President Barack Obama's trip to Cuba in 2016 and had the chance to question the dictator there, Raul Castro, about the island's political prisoners. As the son of a Cuban refugee, I took home this it is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. I have always believed it's the job of the press to hold power to account.

[Krystal Ball]

I've always tried to do that here.

[Sagar Enjeti]

At cnn and I plan on going doing all of that in the future. One final message. Don't give in to the lies. Don't give in to the fear. Hold on to the truth and to hope. Even if you have to get out your phone, record that message. I will not give in to the lies. I will not give in to the fear. Post it on your social media so people can hear from you, too. And so Acosta, as he was alluding to, has new plans. He is over at Substack and he said he was going to be independent for the time being. So I actually have a, so I have a thought here. So for people who are just tuning in, Acosta was known as the CNN guy that was really going after Trump at every single briefing. Trump absolutely loved it.

[Krystal Ball]

Trump called him a real beauty.

[Sagar Enjeti]

He's like, you are fake news. Like in his first briefing, really setting the tone that this was gonna be combat between CNN and Acosta. Acosta later really cashed in on that with a book called the Enemy of the People, which was echoing a phrase that Trump shamefully used to describe the press and still uses to this day as the enemy of the truth to.

[Krystal Ball]

Describe the fake news media.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Fake news media? Not all.

[Krystal Ball]

It wouldn't include you, cuz you're not fake news.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, that's real news right here. But the thought I have is that the Democrats problem is that they hitched their wagon to a corporate structure rather than a, a people powered structure that is not going to stand with them. When there is a rise of a right wing, populist, fascist, whatever you want to call it, when there's a rise of that movement, corporate America, which you have hitched your wagon to through your corporate donors over at the Democratic Party and also corporate media through msnbc, CNN and New York Times and all the others that are funded by corporate advertising. Times now a little bit less so because it has so many subscribers that it's kind of pulled in both directions. But the point is that when the chips are down, these companies are not ideologically hostile to right wing authoritarianism as they demonstrated during World War II when they were willing to work with Nazis even. So these companies are not with you when the going gets tough. So now the going is getting tough. CNN on inauguration day told Jake Tapper and the rest of them covering it. We don't want to hear any pearl clutching, no kind of expressions of outrage from Trump. The complete opposite of four years ago. Did their ideology change? No, the power balance changed. And so because the power balance changed, Sienna's like Acosta, you're out of here. We're not taking on Trump the way we did last time. And so now the Democrats are left defenseless because they allied with people that were not actually allies of them. So that's. So when you use corporate media as your center left mouthpiece, you're gonna get screwed and you're gonna get wiped out whenever the corporate parents profits are threatened.

[Krystal Ball]

Well, when you say when the chips are down as they are now, I then though think Back to like 2017 and the media collaborating with basically the deep state to help take down Donald Trump.

[Sagar Enjeti]

They believed it was a winnable fight then.

[Krystal Ball]

Well, the chips were down to. The chips were down meaning from their perspective, the chips were down. They thought Trump was a fluke. They thought that he was in kind of an emergency and now they're sort.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Of, it could be a threat to the stability they need for profits.

[Krystal Ball]

The stability, Yeah, I think that's a.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Good way to put it. So this cuts both ways. This is not a left or right thing.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, I agree.

[Sagar Enjeti]

The right allying itself with corporate power is going to find itself, you know, not with, you know, hardcore allies. If those corporate allies think that the right is going down and the right is a threat to them, well, this was. They'll happily ally with corporate Democrats instead.

[Krystal Ball]

The hand wringing in like 2018, 19 and then definitely in 2020 over the chamber of Commerce was really fascinating to watch from inside of the conservative world because they realized what was was called fusionism, the three legged stool. Frank Meyer, National Review, William F. Buckley Meaning you combine libertarian economics with strong foreign policy. That's already kind of hilarious. And traditional values also kind of hilarious that the ally with the business community and libertarian economic policy had been undermining what they were pushing on family policy for years and years. Like there wasn't harmony on the right by allying yourself with the Chamber of Commerce. They started going towards ESG DEI and all of these things that conservatives were like, we have helped you with tax cuts. We just helped you with a massive corporate tax cut. And what you are doing is undermining the idea of like the nuclear family and men and women. And we've been on your side for years and this is what you're now doing here. So those, I mean, I don't know, those fissures have been like very real.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And they're still losing corporate America.

[Krystal Ball]

See, this is what's interesting. Democrats are, I mean, and this is what's interesting. But also for conservatives, this is what's interesting right now is if you just go crawling back to the corporate world because Mark Zuckerberg is giving you money again and is talking nice to you again.

[Sagar Enjeti]

CNN's parent is firing Acosta.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, but it all goes to your point. And I would recommend people watch our interviews actually with Don Lemon and Brian Stelter because those were really rare opportun. Like we literally played the Chomsky clip of him saying you don't need people to pay you to tell you what to say. Just the fact that you ask the questions you do, you don't need anybody to tell you to do that. You just agree with them. You're in the position you are to ask those questions because you're the kind of person that would ask the questions that you do of people in positions of power. And Don Lemon and Brian Stelzer were very much in the Jim Acosta vein of the sort of media resistance to Donald Trump. This kind of breathless fact checking that would fact check. You know, if he said he had one or two scoops of ice cream for dinner and has put the media in a situation where trust has dipped to the low, it hit in 2017, back again. It didn't. It's not going up. It's going back down. After having all of these years to learn. The Biden lies for years, I think, are probably. That's probably the biggest reason that trusted media is dipping again to a record low. And media with people allying with people like Jim Acosta has put itself in the situation. Where, to your point, you get Jim Acosta or you get independent media or conservative media, you're forcing people, corporate media forces people to choose between Jim Acosta and Sean Hannity. Right, right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And the key difference between independent media media and corporate media is that you're not actually aligning with Jim Acosta himself as the man. You are allying with Jim Acosta as the anchor for cnn, because that's where he gets his power. And so if the parent company doesn't want him to be Jim Acosta the anchor anymore, now he's Jim Acosta the substacker.

[Krystal Ball]

Yep.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And so Democrats put themselves in a foxhole with corporate media and fighting back against Trump. Trump. And it worked the first time around, but now the second time, Trump is more powerful. And Democrats are looking over at the foxhole, and they're like, all right, you ready to go over the top? Let's charge. And they're like, they just put bullet in Acosta's head. And they're like, no, we're over here with this guy right now. And Trump, he's not gonna welcome them back automatically. However, CBS News, for instance, got busted for. And we talked about this on the program for this, like, kind of crappy editing for this Kamala Harris interview where they made a, like, airheaded answer. Less airheaded. They cut off some of the rambling. But that's well within your First Amendment rights. And when you write an article, you don't put the entire quote. You take the quote. That kind of conveys the message you can agree or disagree with. It wasn't a crime, what they did. Trump sued them, and it was a completely laughable lawsuit. No chance this goes anywhere. What are you doing? You can't sue over editing that. You don't like 60 Minutes. CBS settled with him, which is fascinating. So in other words, this corporate job.

[Krystal Ball]

Disney did it, too.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Cut a big check to the man who's the President of the United States. We used to call that a bribe. Like, that's very clever. File a frivolous lawsuit, get a big check in response. Because CBS doesn't care about journalism. Whatever. They don't care either way. What care about they have a merger that, you know, Paramount, which is the CBS parent company's, trying to merge with Skydance. Like, it's a huge thing that they believe they need for their corporate entity. So if you thought that cbs, as Democrats, if you thought CBS was gonna be part of the resistance, right? CBS has other things. Well, forget cbs. Paramount has other things that they care about and this merger being much more important. So they're like, you know what? Trump takes some money. Sorry about our fake news media over at 60 Minutes and that lousy edit. You're right. We won't do it again. By the way, how's that merger looking? You're not gonna keep any Lina Khan fans around, are you?

[Krystal Ball]

So the interview that Marc Andreessen did with Ross Douthat recently, where he talked about how Silicon Valley, everyone sort of thought they were good Democrats and actually would put their sort of standing as, quote, unquote, good Democrats above tax cuts, right? Like, they would say, we know Obama's gonna, like, raise our taxes, but it's important for us because it sort of helps us internally, personally, psychologically, morally whitewash what we're doing, right? Because as long as you support the Democrats, which is the party of progress, and this is the era before Oberge fell, then you can be on the right side of history and you can keep doing whatever the hell you're doing to the country, radically changing the country. And so this is a huge conversation. We could do this for hours. But I think that's like, to the extent the corporate media was resisting Trump, it was, I think, along those lines. But when radical reform for the left or the right comes up, that's what you see the resistance to. And it happens with Bernie. It's going to happen with Tulsi Gabbard this week. It'll definitely happen with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. There are all kinds of reasons, like, legitimate debates to be had about these people. But we know what side the media. We can predict what side the media is going to be on basically every single time, given the parameters of the conversation, if it's about, like, upending the system that benefits them. So I agree with a lot of that, and I think it's important for the left to think about this right now because of what we talked about with Jeff Stein, that the Trump administration is now calling what is at best a very sloppy rollout that ended up through somebody's fault, we don't know who yet, freezing Medicaid portals and sent charities into, like, freakouts. I saw this, like, personally and. And it's just like the hoax lie is going to work. It's going to work because nobody trusts media. And so this is like a situation that everyone's found themselves in. And this is a good lesson. Ryan, you've laid out some really interesting stuff for the rest of the segment about where the resistance goes from here.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah. And the consequence of Democrats allying themselves with corporate media rather than helping to produce an actually kind of grassroots Democratic media ecosystem, is that now those mainstream media outlets are not broadcasting all of the genuine resistance that is going on. If you get your news from the news, which is where people get their news, either from the mainstream press or from the right wing press, you're not hearing anything about this upsurge in resistance that's, that's going on. Whereas in 2017, it's all you heard about. Yet it, I can tell you, it actually is happening. So last night, for instance, you may have seen this. There was a special election in an Iowa state Senate seat. The Republicans had won that seat by like 20, 21 points last time around. Democrats won it by four. This time, a swing of 25 points. That's the exact same thing that you saw in 2017, that these kind of outraged Democrats were shocked and started coming out to the polls in ways that they really had not before. And Republicans, when Trump was not on the ballot, kind of just stayed home and it led to a bunch of, you know, Trump district people losing in special elections. And that foreshadowing a 2018 blue wave. But now you're not hearing about any of that. And for instance, like, like throughout the country, people are indivisible. Immigration groups, et cetera, are organizing all these meetings. They're getting absolutely overflow crowds. Like there is energy out there and Democrats are actually fighting back. It's just not getting any coverage. So put up D3 here, JB Pritzker in Illinois, and we can roll through these fairly quickly. He's pushing back, back against a lot of the immigration push. A bunch of mayors are saying that they're pushing against that. You can put up D4. This is the Pittsburgh mayor saying they're not working with ice. We talked about this earlier. Democratic attorneys general sued both over the birthright citizenship and also about the funding freeze. Even as kind of congressional Democrats have been flat footed and all over the place and slash. But here's a key point that people need to remember because I think people who watch this program don't fall into this category, but they need to understand that there's millions of people who do put up D6. This is a tweet from David Siegel, progressive populist activist. He points out on Twitter, Harris approval rating among Democrats is 79 to 12. That's now. So let me say that again. Kamala Harris approval rating among Democrats is 79 to 12, and Biden's is only slightly lower. He writes, we desperately need to reform the party, but strategies that might succeed at doing so require recognizing that most rank and file Democrats still like the people at the top for whatever reasons, unquote. So this is not to defend the 79% who are saying that it's. It is to defend the idea that we need to be objective about what people actually believe. Reforming the Democratic Party is going to be interesting, to say the least, when that is the circumstance that they're in. Yet at the same time, you're not seeing that reflected in the media coverage of it either, because they tied themselves to corporate media and corporate media, when its corporate interests were threatened, are abandoning the Democratic Party.

[Krystal Ball]

This is basically what Rick Santorum, in a weird way was trying to tell Republicans back when he was running the 2012 primary, that some of these allies were not really allies. And you know, obviously from a somewhat pro business perspective, like conservative in the Tea Party era, he had to make that argument in a different way. But it took Donald Trump coming as a wrecking ball to totally upset the two party system and force Republicans, at least on the surface, to change for a little bit. And what we're seeing now is a backslide into the warm welcome arms of Big Tech and people like Jeff Bezos. But I mean, I don't know how Democrats, I mean, it's just, it's the problem of entrenched two party power that what incentive do they have really to change when you can just keep cobbling together coalitions that put you slightly over the edge with PR outreach? It just sucks. There's no real incentive. And what Trump did was screw with the primary. And Democrats tried to come in with a wrecking ball in the primary through Bernie Sanders and they were thwarted by the dnc. And for whatever reason, the RNC wasn't able to do that with Donald Trump, probably.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But also, and we need to internalize this, they were also thwarted by Democratic voters.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, no 100% Trump was.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It gives me no pleasure to say.

[Krystal Ball]

That, but that was a primary that easily could have gone another way because Trump was one of what, like 19 candidates or whatever. But if that had just been Trump and a couple of other people, it may have gone a different way. If Other people had been. If there was a coordinated dropout effort like there was to be, Bernie could have easily gone the other way.

[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Krystal Ball]

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[Jeff Stein]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Krystal Ball]

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[Sagar Enjeti]

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[Krystal Ball]

All right, let's talk about this wild story of the Romanian election that's getting virtually no attention here in the US.

[Sagar Enjeti]

They canceled an election because they didn't like the result. That's the short version. The longer version is wild, but it's.

[Krystal Ball]

Getting attention at dropsite.

[Sagar Enjeti]

There you go. So because news has been flying so fast, you may have missed an event in November that in retrospect may turn out to be of truly historic importance. A presidential election was held in a European Union conference. The two establishment parties lost to two outsider parties and the Supreme Court simply annulled the election. And there was no allegation that there were any problems with the voting or the vote counting. So we have a new story up at Dropsite by Alexander Zajcik that takes a deep dive into what happened. It's a wild story and worth a full read, but the short version is that on November 24, Romanian voters delivered an unexpected victory to a right wing populace named Callan Gorgescu and in the opening round of the country's presidential election. So always considered a long shot, Gorgesko had been polling in the single digits just weeks before surging to claim first place with 23% of the vote moving on to the runoff. The result shocked Romania's two dominant parties who found themselves on the sidelines as Gorgesko campaigned for the runoff against another anti establishment campaign who came in second place, Elena Lasconi of the reformist Save Romania party. Now, five days later, a news outlet called Context elevated claims that the election had been swung by the Kremlin through a social media campaign on November 29, the outlet reported. The outlet published a report that included a summary of an analysis it conducted using software from a Ukrainian firm that for the last several years had had NATO and EU and others as clients. Now, for the past several years, Context has participated in a region wide NGO project to investigate the, quote, pro Kremlin conspiracy and alt right disinformation ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe, unquote. The participating groups often have similar funding streams and various Western institutional connections. In the case of Context, its budget is overwhelmingly covered by funding from the State Department funded National Endowment for Democracy and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global reporting network that we recently reported over at Dropsite is heavily funded by the US government. So Contact's executive director spent 20 years working in the press office of the US embassy in Bucharest. Now, on December 4, four days before the deciding round was supposed to take place, Romania's Supreme Defense Council released a small batch of heavily redacted documents from the country's foreign intelligence service. The documents outlined allegations of a Kremlin backed social media campaign that supported Gorgesko in violation of national election laws. Quote, data were obtained, the accompanying government statement read, quote, revealing an aggressive promotion campaign that exploited the algorithms of some social media platforms to increase the popularity of Callen Grigesko at an accelerated pace. Within hours, the U.S. state Department expressed its, quote, concern over the allegations. Two days later, on December 6th, Romania's Constitutional Court unanimously ruled the November 24th vote was invalid. Quote, the entire electoral process for electing the president of Romania is annulled, the court announced, citing government claims of irregularities on social media. Now, a week and a half ago, the court finally announced a new date of May 4 for a new election. Radio Free Europe and Radio Radio Free Europe, radiolib, which is funded by the US Reported Romania had become the latest victim of a, quote, aggressive hybrid war waged by the Kremlin. Four US Senators issued a statement condemning, quote, Vladimir Putin's manipulation of Chinese Communist Party controlled TikTok to undermine Romania's democratic process. So it wasn't just Russia, now it's Russia and China. The State Department, though, seemed fine with the election cancellation, saying in a statement, quote, we note the Romanian Constitutional Court's decision today, unquote, and expressed, quote, confidence in Romania's democratic institutions and processes, including investigations into foreign malign influence. Okay, so that's the case they laid out. The whodunit is so fun. I don't even want to spoil it for readers, but I'm going to, because this is a newscast. I'm going to tell you how this ended. It was not the Kremlin. It was not Chairman Xi. What happened was the pnl, which is one of the establishment parties, did that thing where you go and support a fringe candidate to try to draw votes away from your opponent. Both major parties in the US do this. The Democrats love to boost Libertarians, little Reid Hoffman Act Senate seats. Reid Hoffman likes to do it. And Republicans are the most aggressive advocates for Green Party ballot access all the time. So what happened here? Imagine the scenario is that basically both the Democrats and the Republicans lost, and the Greens and the Libertarians went to the second round accidentally boosted by these moronic establishment parties. So that's what happened. So the funding, funding for this TikTok campaign came from one of the major establishment parties. And what's wild and Alex goes into this in the article, is that when they originally put out that batch of documents showing that this whole thing happened, the name of the consulting firm that had run this entire operation was redacted. So in other words, Romania knew the name. And not only did Romanian know it, the US Knew it. The name of the consulting firm that ran it was redacted. We now know the identity of that consulting firm. And it is a consulting firm that works almost only with this one establishment Romanian party. So from the very beginning. And also Alex talks about how they'd seen this consulting firm. You know, people had seen Them going in and out of the offices like it was. Everybody knew, everybody knows that this consulting firm only works with this party like that. It's like we have the same thing here in the United States. You got firms that work with Republicans, firms that work with Democrats. So once they identified, oh, this social media campaign is being run by this consulting firm, they immediately knew that it was one of these parties, that it was this particular party that had funded this operation. Yet instead they redacted it and claimed that it was Russia. Russia knowing full well that it was not. This was not a mistake. Where they're like, oh boy, sure has all the hallmarks as they. All the hallmarks of a Russian counterintel operation wasn't even that they knew with certainty for a fact who ran this thing. And the State Department publicly supported the annulment of this election. Anyway, the key point here, why they care so much about Romania. You used to think that Germany had the most important European American military base. Not anymore. Romania now is host to the most important American military base in Europe. And a right wing populist who has said that the war between Ukraine and Russia, Russia ought to end, is a direct threat to American military interests vis a vis that base.

[Krystal Ball]

And so here we are, the other part of the story. First, as I was reading this reporting, I was like, it needs like a flowchart because the other one is relying on the assessment that it was Russia from a firm that does most of its work with NATO. Right, right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

They use this Ukrainian AI software company, they claim that. And this is the US funded news outlet relying on a Ukrainian NATO funded analytics firm that's using some AI that says, yep, we have concluded. So think about this back up for a second. Like the US and there's Romanian establishment parties are accusing Russia of interfering in Romanian politics. Who is leading the charge in making that accusation? A U.S. funded news outlet relying on a NATO funded Ukrainian software company claiming that there is foreign interference. Yeah, it's like guys blaming Russia, that's kind of foreign interference.

[Krystal Ball]

It's foreign interference.

[Sagar Enjeti]

You're actually doing the thing that you're accusing Russia of doing.

[Krystal Ball]

Yes. And it's getting like no coverage in American media because it's like, oh, Romania, whatever.

[Sagar Enjeti]

I think it should cause it's the cancellation of an election. A NATO country when you don't have any evidence of voter fraud or anything. Like no allegations that the vote was tainted. Like the people went out and voted and voted for these two characters.

[Krystal Ball]

There's zero evidence that votes were tampered with.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And it doesn't mean I like this Gorgesko guy. He's like a right wing creep, but come on, the guy won.

[Krystal Ball]

If votes are not tampered with, if you cannot prove that votes are tampered with and you're just mad that someone came in and put up a bunch of, let's just say, billboards, whether they're digital billboards, physical billboards, digital flyers, or literal flyers, and you say that it was foreign interference, but it was actually Romanians. But it's like saying that we have to cancel out, like. Yeah, but let's say hypothetically that it was Russia and it was like Russia's little Facebook campaign in the closing days of 2016 election to divide Americans along the BLM lines and the LGBT lines. Those ads are still like, very funny. If you go read the Senate report from 2018, when they found the memes that Russia was posting, let's just say that's what happened. Hypothetically, do I think that we should be transparent about if foreign powers are funding propaganda? Absolutely. Do I think there should be rules about what money you're allowed to take in elections from foreign powers? Absolutely. But people are making up their minds. You're still fundamentally getting mad with voters. It's fundamentally about voters.

[Sagar Enjeti]

It does raise a thorny question because there are also sovereignty questions. So I think there's a threshold issue. Like if Russian TikTok thing. Let's say it was Russia, and it's a little TikTok thing. It's like, get out of here. It's not persuasive enough that you've swung the entire election, but let's say Russia came in and, like, ostentatiously spent a billion dollars supporting the candidate that they liked in complete contravention of Romanian law. I can see a case where you're like, no, you can't do that. What does Trump say? We have borders. You're not a country, you don't have borders. And if you're not a country, you can't pass some laws and have them respected.

[Krystal Ball]

Totally.

[Sagar Enjeti]

But I understand how that can be a slippery slope to exactly what just happened. But this is tricky stuff to think through. However, none of that even happened here. This was a Romanian establishment party that screwed itself accidentally and then used its own screwing to annul the election.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, I mean, it feels like we're in the vibe shift moment now, but this is what you're going to see attacking the populist left and populist right long term as a major theme. It's going to be technocratic Elite elites using the powers of or abusing, exploiting the powers of technology, which completely shrinks the globe to undermine people. So saying that we couldn't control TikTok, we couldn't control the messaging on TikTok. So elections canceled, like, sorry. Because everything is now so consolidated and centralized that you can look at a campaign, an alleged campaign on social media and say that it totally upended the election and validated the election. And you can do that from your perch in the technocracy. So this is, I mean, this is a taste of what's to come, but it's a significant taste of what's to come because it screwed up the Romanian election, NATO country, EU country, and we were involved, shamefully involved. Yeah, great story.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Fascinating.

[Krystal Ball]

Good reason to subscribe to Dropsite.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That's right, go subscribe to Dropsite. Cool stuff like that. And this was published in collaboration with Truthdig. Alexander is an editor over at Truthdig. Up next, we've got Trump's real estate buddy Steve Witkoff went to Gaza.

[Krystal Ball]

You made it sound like we were having Steve Witkoff on the show.

[Sagar Enjeti]

That would be cool.

[Krystal Ball]

But even better, we have Witkoff is.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Welcome on the show anytime he wants.

[Krystal Ball]

That's right.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Even better, we have my drop site colleague Murtaza Hussain, who just returned from a reporting trip in Syria. He's going to talk about that and also about this Witkoff visit to Gaza. Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff visited Gaza today along with Netanyahu Lt. Ron Dermer visiting the Netsireem quarter. If we can put up this first element here, scooped by Barack Ravid, as all things Netanyahu seemed to be scooped by, he writes, White House envoy Witkoff visited on Wednesday the net's Ream quarter inside the Gaza Strip, together with the Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs, Ron Dermer. This is the first visit by a US government official in Gaza for at least 15 years. So joining us now to discuss this and also a recent reporting trip that he took to Syria is my drop site colleague Maaz Hussain. Maaz, thanks so much for joining us.

[Murtaza Hussain]

Thanks for having me.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And so Witkoff had actually floated this in, I believe it was in a Fox News interview recently, causing complete pandemonium among Israeli political observers and political participants, saying they're already panicked about this guy because he forced Netanyahu to work on Shabbat and then forced them into this deal that is now unfolding. They accuse him of being basically a puppet of Qatar. When he said he was going to go visit Gaza, they completely lost their minds. Oftentimes that kind of meltdown would yield a backing off, a retreating from the position. Instead, he ends up going to Netzerim Corridor. I think, importantly, with Ron Dermer, who is this guy that very well known around Washington, used to be Israel's ambassador to Washington. He's the guy from Miami. Netanyahu is probably closest conflict, very smooth operator. So they wanted a babysitter with him as he's going in there. What do you make of Witkoff's willingness to go through with this kind of in the face of Israeli opposition?

[Murtaza Hussain]

Well, you know, I've been watching very closely the Trump administration's nascent sort of approach to Israel, Palestine and the Middle east more generally, because of the fact that obviously the Trump coalition contains very different streams of people with different views of foreign policy. And some people, people are the more neocon type people, you could say, who dominated in the first term. But there's this very strong, you could say America first nationalist type of contingent as well, too. And they're very skeptical of further deep US Military involvements in the Middle east and even Europe to an extent, too. So they would like to extricate themselves from the situation. And I don't know exactly yet. And obviously from the first Trump term, I'm cautious and wary of the approach he's going to take. But I do think there's some hints that maybe the latter category is seeing its views represented more strongly. We saw this some of the personnel decisions too, or some of the not even personnel decisions, some decisions Trump made to kind of sideline the Iran hawk people from his first term in the last few weeks. So Wyckoff, you know, he's taking these steps, pushing for the ceasefire, kind of, as he's mentioned, forcing Netanyahu to work on Shabbat. I think Netanyahu is very secular anyway. I think that was excuse made him do that. And now, you know, the ceasefire, we see people returning north to north of Gaza, we see Witkoff actually visiting. These are all tentatively good signs potentially that Trump will be taking a different path than he did in the first term, at least to some degree, a relative degree, vis a vis Israel and Palestine. But also it seems like a repudiation of what Biden was doing. Biden was giving Netanyahu every single thing he wants. And one very consistent theme with Trump, maybe even more than any particular views he has about foreign policy or the U.S. role in the world, is that he likes to stick it to the Democrats, stick it to his predecessor. So if Biden was giving everything Bibi wants Well, let's make Bibi work on Shabbat and then maybe we'll force him to end the war. And Trump, if he did have one consistent message, he said he would end the war. He wasn't very specific always how he'd do that, but he did say that end. So I think he does have a lot of political capital invest. So I would say I'm cautiously monitoring and there's some glimmers of hope there. And Wyckoff's visit to Gaza seems to be another data point in that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And speaking of Syria and the Netanyahu administration's kind of pressure here, Israel, cats, you may have seen this, visited what they call Mount Hermon recently in the Golan Heights and said that basically they're not leaving and they're just fortifying it more aggressively. Do we have this in English or should we just roll this as a vo? All right. So people can, if you're watching, you can read this. So he's went up to this basically ski resort that is in the Golan Heights that is now illegally occupied by Israel, and they're claiming that they're going to keep this, keep this territory that they've claimed indefinitely. And so, Maaz, you just got back from Syria. I guess the first question is kind of like, what were your impressions after having not been there for so long? What is the place like on the ground?

[Murtaza Hussain]

You know, Syria was a very nice country. My family used to go on vacation in Syria because it was just like a nice place to go. Today if you go to Syria, it's like the apocalypse happens there beyond. You know, you see pictures of Gaza, half the country looks like Gaza. It's just completely flat in buildings, rubble, destruction. Even in the quote unquote normal areas. It's, you know, people don't have food, they don't have, you know, they're fancy areas. People are selling, you know, Fifth Avenue, it could be turned into people selling used shoes and things like that. That's kind of the level of economic devastation that's taking place there. Even the supply chains, like, for food and things like that, they've broken down. So people are just doing whatever they can. The level of suffering is just unbelievable. It's a post apocalyptic, I would say sort of environment inside Syria. And you know, I mentioned a lot of areas are destroyed, their whole cities which are destroyed. There are people living in the rubble who have been living there for a very long time with no electricity, no water. Somehow they're still managing to get their kids educated, doing everything they can. Can even try to make the best they can situation. But it's just an unbelievably devastating situation. And as long as you take Gaza to rebuild, it's going to take a very, very long time. You have to extrapolate that to a whole country, maybe 10 times the population of Gaza. That same level of destruction is very, very evident there. And secondly, I'll tell you from the beginning, it was a very strange environment because when I crossed the border from Jordan, I drove over, I was expecting to see the former government people working at the border, maybe with different bosses, because my understanding, as you read in the news, other people with that the government was not dissolved entirely. They kept personnel there. What I found actually was that the new guys are completely in control. The old government guys are not there. And it was. Everything was very informal. They were just guys with assault rifles and no one was wearing uniforms. And they just kind of waved me through. They were like, you know, welcome, didn't really ask too many questions, things like that. It was a completely aberrant situation. And maybe it'll change sometime in a couple of weeks or months, but it's very much in flux and they have a tremendous task ahead of them to hold the country together if they can. And if they can rebuild the country, even better. But it's not going to be easy.

[Krystal Ball]

And this is another immediate test of Donald Trump's foreign policy. And I'm curious, Maaz, what you might have picked up on what people there are expecting to see or maybe aren't sure sure what to expect to see from the Trump administration? Obviously, his policy both towards Israel and Syria. We're kind of like reading the tea leaves, trying to figure out what might extrapolate from the first administration and public statements and personnel to what might happen in the near term future. Did you get a sense of what people are hearing or expecting or maybe what they're not hearing or not expecting when you were over there?

[Murtaza Hussain]

Yeah. First of all, it's very interesting because it was never the case. You could ask people their opinion before. So having the idea of having a casual conversation, what you think about what's going to happen politically, domestically, abroad, that was a completely new thing for people there because there's so much fear before and people just didn't weren't comfortable doing it. So now you can't have those conversations. And I would say, generally speaking, people, you know, they're relieved in the short term that, okay, something is changing and, you know, we're a bit freer, we have to pay bribes all time, just day to day life. But to your point, what's going to happen now domestically, internationally, is great unknown. People are very, very concerned. Many people I spoke to were concerned that, well, this could just be a breather before a new war, could be a breather before foreign powers, potentially the US among them, may seek to divide the country, they may seek to partition it on ethnic grounds, or there's a lot of concern about that. So I think Trump, the concern about Trump is one of many concerns people have. And obviously the US Role in the region is often mediated through Israel. So what Israel does is kind of sees an extension of what the US Is doing because of the fact that obviously Israel is heavily armed by the US and gives political and diplomatic cover. And there is concern. There's concern that maybe they may try to carve off more parts of the country, they may try to arm people inside the country to format more chaos. People are very, very, very concerned about this. And, you know, for Trump's perspective, from what I've seen of Trump so far, he doesn't seem like he wants to get deeply involved in nation building or nation building or having the US Deeply invested in Syria or anywhere else in the Middle East. For the most part, I believe he announced or there was a leak that he may be planning to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. And U.S. troops in Syria, they play a very particular role. They were there to fight ISIS when ISIS was very, very active. And they're defending some of the Kurdish groups that were helping fight ISIS at that time. And they also keep this very large prison complex called Al Hol, where tens of thousands of ISIS former ISIS members and their families, and also some innocent civilians are incarcerated. So the US May withdraw that presence, and if they do, it'll inevitably create a vacuum where something else happens in there. So either there'll be a resumption of fighting between central government and the Kurdish groups, or maybe ISIS people will revive. These are all open questions right now. But there are things that people are thinking about and concerned about. And I said the situation is still very much developing, but what the US does is very much top of mind for many people.

[Sagar Enjeti]

And something you had mentioned to me I found really interesting where you said that Assad, of course, has fallen and fled, but elements of his regime are still holding some territory and still fighting, that the war is over in the sense that it's been won by HTs, but yet the war is not actually over yet. Can you talk a little bit about who these elements are that are still fighting and could you imagine them? Let's say the US withdraws. Now the Kurds are more vulnerable. Could you see the Kurds allying with some of these kind of gang elements to try to weaken the central government, to maintain their own position? What's going on with the fighting?

[Murtaza Hussain]

So by the time the government collapsed, the degradation of the state had been so extensive that you effectively had, you know, gangs. It was basically a gang with no ideology which was controlling the country. And they were involved in drug trafficking, particularly Captagon, you know, other for smuggling. They're making a lot of money for themselves. And so the regime left. It was decapitated, you could say. The head of the regime fled to Russia and many other leaders scattered. We don't know exactly where, but there are all these military units were controlled by officers and they'd be turned into gangs. Basically they were mafias. And when the government fell, they disappeared. Like you don't see them in Damascus anymore. And interestingly, in Damascus, they used to be Bashar Assad's photo. Every single corner. There's not a single trace of them anymore. So they kind of disappeared from earth, at least from the major cities. But they've gone to the countryside, they've gone to the coast, and you know, they still maintain they have their money, they have their cliques around them and so forth. And the government has offered that people can demobilize certain cases, former soldiers and so forth, they can turn in their weapons and go home. But a lot of people who are more senior or who were allegedly implicated in crimes during the government, they don't have that option. And some of them don't want to do that either. They have financial interests, they have power independently in their own right. So it's kind of like it's a very Hobbesian situation, you can say, because there is a state now which is trying to assert a monopoly in violence, but the previous state didn't have monopoly on violence. So you're trying to reimpose order on this very, very big country with lots of guns and lots of money and lots of drugs floating around is a pretty significant line of territory. And I'll tell you that the level of traveling around the country, the level of control that the government has doesn't seem totally clear because there are not that many of them. There are only maybe a couple tens of thousands of people that controlled one province, province now their control, suddenly the whole country, which I think they were not expecting. What I saw of HTS is mostly 16, 17 year olds with AK47s who were just kind of standing around and, you know, guarding stuff or taking pictures and things like that, that they're not seemingly ready to serve control of the entire country. So it's going to take a very long time. And to your point, this creates a very fertile environment for potential subversion or infiltration of the country. Country. Obviously these former regime elements, they kind of don't have many options left if they were implicated in crimes and things like that. So they may seek to outshine patronage. So a country that you could think of as the UAE potentially can get involved, which have done in other countries like Sudan and Libya and so forth. Israel and the US they could seek to arm certain elements to cause trouble for the governments to carve out pieces of Syrian territory for themselves. It's a very, very febrile environment. And I would say everyone wants a piece of Syria, fortunately. And the people have suffered so much, there's so much destruction. And I would say the vast majority of people of all backgrounds simply just want no more wars. And they want the economy to recover and sanctions to be lifted and go back to somewhat semblance of normality. But I think that the geopolitical interest of other countries are so strong that there will be a lot of resistance to that. And you can only hope that whoever's in charge is able to reassert control. But it's going to be, like I said, a very, very difficult path. And reasserting just physical control is the first step towards that.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, it would be incredibly difficult to do it if Syria had real borders and was just fighting among the factions that were within the Syrian borders. But to your point, the instability can be kind of generated and furthered by elements that have a lot of interest in making sure that Syria. Syria isn't able to kind of reconstitute itself as a real state. And I get somewhat related to this, I'll point out. So today's Wednesday. Tomorrow night, Thursday at 8pm at Drop Site, we're screening a documentary about Syria which focuses on American leftists. Like, we had one of the Brooklyn hipsters on this program talking about how he kind of went over and fought with the YPG against isis. We'll be screening that document. Whenever he drops that, I can put a link in there. And Maz will be leading the Q and A with the director afterwards. But so hope everybody checks that out. The opportunity to catch that for free. Maz, welcome back to the States and thanks so much for joining us.

[Murtaza Hussain]

Yeah, thanks for having us.

[Sagar Enjeti]

All right. Yeah. So these rebels might have bitten off more than they can chew. It's almost impossible to see how. How they're gonna be able to build an effective state under these conditions. And what he was saying, he was telling me before, they have electricity even in the best areas, like, two hours a day, which means that the food is all, like, inedible. The meat is gray. Imagine trying to run a restaurant or a grocery store or anything when you have two hours of refrigeration. So he was eating a lot of nuts and berries and stuff. Stuff or dried berries. Because it's not like you can not like you have access to, like, fresh fruit. And people, as he was pointing out, have been living like that for more than 10 years.

[Krystal Ball]

Right, right. I mean, the other thing I just wanted to say as a takeaway from that is I'm really glad you guys are sending people at dropsite into places like this where typically only corporate press can afford to go. I mean, it costs a ton of money. You need to have a reasonable assumption. Your reporters will be. It's really hard to do and to have independent eyes on the ground. I just think that's a really good sign of what you guys are up to.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Yeah, really, really interesting stuff.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, definitely. This was a packed show. We fit in all of the debates about the constitutionality of executive officials.

[Sagar Enjeti]

Settled all those.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, we did. We solved the problem. And we even got to have some fun with Jim Acosta for a bit. So I consider that a win, definitely. All right, well, breakingpoints.gov is where you could go to get a premium subscription. Support the show. We always appreciate that. Thanks to everybody for tuning in. We'll be back here, of course, next Wednesday with more counterpoints.

[Sagar Enjeti]

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